Essays From The Margins [Hardcover]

These essays emerge from different crucial and complex conflicts: from the memory of a bishop, Bartolome de las Casas, urging the pope of his time to cleanse the church of complicity with violence, oppression, and slavery; from the lament and defiance of so many Middle Eastern women, victims of male domination and too many wars; from the voices bursting out from the colonial margins that dare to question and transgress the norms and laws imposed by colonizers and conquerors; from the emerging and diverse theological disruptions of traditional orthodoxies and rigid dogmatisms; from the denial of human rights to immigrant communities, living in the shadows of opulent societies; from the use of the sacred Hebrew Scriptures to displace and dispossess the indigenous peoples of Palestine. The essays belong to different intellectual genres and conceptual crossroads and are thus illustrative of the dialogic imagination that the Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin considered basic to any serious intellectual enterprise. They are also the literary sediment of years of sharing lectures, dialogues, and debates in several academic institutions in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Switzerland, Germany, and Palestine. A unique and far-reaching collection of essays and lectures in which Rivera-Pagan once again shows his unsurpassable ability to combine a passion for justice with academic rigor, intellectual creativity, and a love of literature. --Justo Luis Gonzalez, professor emeritus, Candler School of Theology, Atlanta, GA Rivera-Pagan's keen theological perspicacity is at its best in this critical and unswerving history that goes from biblical times to sixteenth-century West Indies and twenty-first-century West Bank, reclaiming the memory of the oppressed, the voices of the silenced, and the promises from the margins. This is a rousing read for candid historians and audacious theologians eager to not only learn from and combat tyranny lC&